It's hard to keep up with all the developments in the developer world. I Programmer's team cover a wide range of topics, from AI to web development with comment and analysis you won't find elsewhere. This summary covers this week's news, articles and book reviews.

Front-End Web Development Ian Elliot awarded this book a rating of 4 out of 5, explaining:This book is light on explanation and heavy on example. It really is learning by doing and for me this is inefficient, slow and tiresome, but if you want to learn this way then this is a good example of the method.

Speaking JavaScript Ian Elliot awarded this book a very high rating of 4.8 out of 5 concluding:This book is a good read and if you are serious about JavaScript you probably need a copy, if only to find out what a JavaScript-oriented position on a given topic is.

News

There is a sad fascination in going over lists of jobs that are close to being lost forever to AI or robotic systems - Go player, Truck driver, warehouse worker, taxi driver, delivery worker, front end developer. Yes front end developer.

WWDC17, Apple's annual developer conference, is underway in San Jose and the keynote included announcements about iOS 11 and WatchOS 4 that open up new possibilities. The App Store also has a brand new look with benefits for developers.

Google has announced a Capture the Flag contest with an online qualification round lasting 48 hours taking place on June 17th and 18th. The top ten finalist teams will be invited to Google to compete onsite for a prize pool of $31,337.

Grimoire Lab is an open source toolkit built on Python, Elasticsearch and Kibana. It taps into GitHub's raw data through Perceval, a module designed for retrieving data from repositories related to software development.

Google has just announced that Chrome will no longer support native code in the form of PNaCl. Instead it will follow the lead of the other browser makers and rely on WebAssembly for fast code. In short, WebAssembly won.

Turing Tumble, a game that lets you build a mechanical computer powered by marbles to solve logic puzzles and is intended to teach kids how to think about computers, has already well exceeded its target on Kickstarter.

As another month closes and new stats become available we take another look at browser market shares from StatCounter Global Stats and reflect on a recent blog posts from Mozilla and from ex-Mozillian, Andreas Gal with the title "Chrome Won".

Floating point is the numerical format used for most calculations and we tend to trust it, but this trust is misplaced. Floating point calculations can be so wrong that they resemble noise. Now there is a way to automatically detect when things go wrong.

The Core

React seems to be taking over the web frontend, but it is remarkably hard to discover what it actually brings to the party. What is the problem that React seems to solve? The only way to find out is to strip it bare of its tools, UI declarative language and ES6 and take it right back to basics.